The Chosen Abductor

By EMILY NUSSBAUM

Published: November 5, 2006

THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT

By Heidi Julavits.

356 pp. Doubleday. $24.95.

Anyone who survived the identity politics wars of the 1980's can remember all too vividly that primal scene of the period, the gray-area accusation. There were children waving anatomically-correct dolls; students ratting out professors for smutty classroom talk; vigilantes scrawling the names of date-rapists on college bathroom stalls. Everyone everywhere seemed to be telling the story of what had happened to them, and the question of whether you should doubt that story or believe it was the paramount issue of the day.

A whole genre of literature has emerged from this era, including plays from ''Oleanna'' to ''Proof'' and novels like Francine Prose's academic satire ''The Blue Angel'' and James Lasdun's spooky ''Horned Man.'' It's an understandable development, because the gray-area accusation is a terrific dramatic device. You've got a mystery; you've got a neatly compressed setting -- a courtroom, a classroom, a shrink's office. You've got a bunch of unreliable narrators facing off over their unreliable stories. And you've got juicy material, since gray-area accusations inevitably concern the fuzzy line between consent and coercion, seduction and something more sinister.

''The Uses of Enchantment'' is a twisty little addition to this growing mini-genre. A black-humored tale of psychoanalysis, Yankee repression and prep school angst, the book takes its title from Bruno Bettelheim, but its primary texts are Freud's analysis of Dora, the feminist critiques of Freud's analysis of Dora and the Salem witch trials. But at its heart, this is the gray-area drama of one gray little family and its black sheep. That lost lamb is Mary Veal -- who at 16 became her small New England town's latest (take your pick) victim or false accuser. Now, 15 years later, she has returned home for her mother's funeral, looking for a little closure and a little comfort.

Instead she finds a hostile family and a home where everything feels sucked dry or else soaked in alcohol. As Mary cycles through the miserable rituals of grieving -- enduring occasional bruising wisecracks from her sisters -- the reader picks up references to a mystery in Mary's past, something that happened when Mary was a teenager. It involves her running away. Or being kidnapped. Or faking a kidnapping. Or seducing someone, or being seduced, or being hypnotized, or being raped. Whatever actually happened, it estranged her from her mother, badly enough that she banned Mary from visiting her deathbed.

Julavits alternates chapters along three separate chronological paths. In the first, we follow Mary through her miserable present, as she hunts down her adolescent history like a grief-stricken detective. In the second, we read the hilariously wrongheaded notes of Dr. Beaton Hammer, the therapist who treated her in the aftermath of the incident. And in chapters titled ''What Might Have Happened,'' we find out what passes for the real story. It is the strange tale of a schoolgirl who stepped into a strange man's car, dropped her hockey stick by the roadside to make sure someone would notice she was gone, and interpreted the man's cautiously receptive response as ''bewildered gratitude to some unspecified higher power that this girl should walk into a trap that he had yet to even set.'' This encounter between a muted Humbert and a deliberate Lolita who, in essence, kidnapped herself, feels like a surreal dream. And as the three narratives come together, the book tightens into a crisis of storytelling -- a dark vaudeville in which teenage girls know very well what is expected of them and act it out as a way of testing their own power, and in which tales of abuse substitute for one another like metaphors.

The funniest and most successful chapters are the accounts of Mary's psychiatrist, Hammer. A grandiose but vulnerable mini-Freud, Hammer is a clueless interpreter of his bratty Scheherazade -- at times her dupe, at times her prosecutor. Like Freud, who bent Dora's story to suit his own theories, Hammer sees Mary as his opportunity to nail down his reputation: she's a case study to establish his diagnosis of ''hyper radiance'' in teenage girls. But through his notes, we can see that Mary is the one who is in charge. She struts around like a dominatrix in button-fly jeans, performing more than she's confessing, acting out a series of victimized-woman stories that are enmeshed like Russian dolls: her story (or stories), the tale of another girl from her school who faked her abduction and the account of a family member accused of being a witch. And there's something suspicious about the way her behavior models that of Freud's most famous patient -- right down to the hysterical cough and the autoerotic fiddling with the clasp of her compact.

A story with this many moving parts could easily feel overclever. And there are a few missteps: Mary's nemesis, a feminist therapist who models the worst side of victimology, is portrayed with such broad strokes that the satire turns sour. But any small off notes are outweighed by the book's disarming strangeness and steady flow of mordant one-liners. ''Amnesia was not a disease, it was a practical use of storage space.'' The dark exchanges between Mary and her chosen abductor amount to a kind of screwball therapy. ''There's nothing funny about implied child abuse.'' ''I'm not implying. You're implying.'' ''I'm not implying, I'm accusing.''

There's a neat puzzle-box quality to the way Julavits sets forth these themes without ever really resolving them. But the book is most successful at exploring the psychology of a particular type of teenage girl, an apparently colorless figure who reveals under pressure a perverse bravado. Oscillating between vampish provocateur and blank slate, Mary may not be precisely realistic -- her dialogue is so arch it practically bends backward -- but there is something recognizable about this mess of a teenage girl, so enraged at the lies of adults that she is willing to take on any mask to expose them. If she lied, the young Mary explains to Dr. Hammer, it was ''because the truth is so clearly unbelievable.''

For anyone who might imagine Julavits -- a member of the McSweeney's circle, best-known for her antisnark manifesto in the literary magazine The Believer -- to be a soft touch, ''The Uses of Enchantment'' will be a welcome corrective. But despite its caustic style, the story, by its final chapters, reveals its sadder underpinnings. Because in the final analysis, the book's central mystery is not about what happened to Mary. It's about what happened between Mary and her mother -- about Mary's search for a clue that her mother was on her side. That she loved her. Or at the very least, that she forgave her for what did or did not happen.